Research is all about collaboration – sometimes just across the School! A cross-disciplinary team made up of past and present members of IID, GSC, CHASM and the BRF have together published “Advanced immunophenotyping of lymphocyte and monocyte subsets in healthy Australian adults using a novel spectral flow cytometry panel” in Frontiers in Immunology, led by Ainsley Davies and Katrina Randall of the Canberra Clinical Phenomics Service.

The study describes the development of a new spectral flow cytometry panel for deep immunophenotyping of white blood cell subsets. This represents an advancement on current immunophenotyping practices in clinical flow cytometry laboratories. The key difference is the use of spectral flow cytometry — a technology that enables simultaneous detection of many fluorescent markers, allowing identification of many more cell types within a single sample. This new spectral flow cytometry panel can measure 58 cell populations at once; previously, to measure this many cell types would have required more blood volume, more money and much more time.

The study reports the measurements of these various cell types in 148 healthy individuals, and the panel has since been adopted by multiple research groups at JCSMR and beyond, including projects on inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and platelet disorders. It is the first diagnostic tool developed by the Canberra Clinical Phenomics Service (CCPS), supported by MRFF National Critical Research Infrastructure funding. The test is now on the path to formal approval by the TGA as an accredited diagnostic tool. In the future, this technology could help improve how we diagnose and monitor immune-related diseases.

List of all the authors and their affiliations below: 

Ainsley R. Davies^1,2

Kristy Kwong^1,2,3

Zhijia Yu¹

Koula E. M. Diamand^2,4

Fei-Ju Li^2,5

Laurensia Kannitha¹

Sidra A. Ali⁶

Abolfazl Amjadipour⁷

Ann-Maree Padarin¹

Michael Devoy⁵

Harpreet Vohra⁵

Bahar Miraghazadeh⁷

Simon H. Jiang^7,8

Anne Brüstle⁷

Nicolas Cherbuin⁹

Christopher J. Nolan^7,10

Matthew C. Cook³

Elizabeth E. Gardiner⁶

Stuart Read^2,11

Euan McNaughton¹

Katrina L. Randall^1,10,12*

¹Canberra Clinical Phenomics Service, JCSMR, ANU

²Phenomics Translation Initiative, JCSMR, ANU

³Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

⁴ANU Centre for Therapeutic Discovery, JCSMR, ANU

⁵Cytometry, Histology and Advanced Spatial Multiomics, JCSMR, ANU

⁶Division of Genome Science and Cancer, JCSMR, ANU

⁷Division of Immunology and Infectious Disease, JCSMR, ANU

⁸Department of Renal Medicine, The Canberra Hospital

⁹National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, ANU

¹⁰School of Medicine and Psychology, ANU

¹¹South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, Adelaide

¹²Department of Immunology, and Department of Immunopathology, ACT Pathology, Canberra Health Services